Reading: Dawn Wind

[white_hart]

Rosemary Sutcliff's Dawn Wind is full of the tropes of YA postapocalyptic fiction. It opens with the 14-year-old protagonist waking up to the realisation that everyone he ever knew is dead and he is all alone in the world; later, he and a girl he meets eke out a living in the burnt-out and deserted ruins of their home city, foraging for food and having to avoid lawless bands of armed men. So far, so standard; but the difference here is that the book begins in around 680AD, and is historical fiction, not science fiction, and the world that has ended is the last relic of Romanised Britain, crushed by the Saxons in the battle that takes place just before the story begins. Somehow this was the book Station Eleven most reminded me of, and made me want to re-read. It's also a hopeful book, as Owain serves out the years first as thrall and then as trusted retainer to a Saxon family and sees the beginnings of co-operation between Saxons and the British remaining in Wales; the "dawn wind" of the title beginning to blow after the dark century when the remains of the Roman civilisation were slowly destroyed by the invaders.

Dawn Wind isn't my favourite Sutcliff; that will always be Frontier Wolf, and more generally I much prefer the novels set in Roman Britain. The Saxon Britain of Dawn Wind is a much poorer place, a land of isolated farms in clearings in the woods, each settlement much more cut off from its neighbours than the Roman towns, as the roads crumble away and groups of bandits roam the land. It's a sad book; there's a real sense of how much has been irrecoverably lost. In the light of Recent Events, I got a bit teary at this bit:

For the space of two men's lives at least, we have stood alone, we in Britain, cut off from all that Rome once stood for, from all that we thought worth dying for. And today we have joined hands with those days of the Long Wandering [...] - a light clasp yet, and easily broken, but surely it will strengthen. [...] Not the dawn as yet, [...] but I think the dawn wind stirring.

Actually, I got a bit teary at quite a few bits. It's not an easy read, but I found it very rewarding this time round; I think it's probably one of Sutcliff's less well-known books, and that's a shame, as it deserves a wider audience.

Comments

[callmemadam]

How lucky I was to borrow all Rosemary Sutcliff's books from the library when I was young! I love all the Roman books but have a special love for Simon, about the English Civil War.

[sollers]

Alas, Sutcliff has been so Jossed by history and archaeology that I find it hard to read the books now; it's like reading science fiction set on a watery Venus.

[aunty_marion]

There was the time they did actually find a wingless Roman Eagle in the ruins of Calleva Atrebatum, though...

[sollers]

Sure, but that's actually a different matter. The big question among archaeologists at the moment is the extent to which the inhabitants of eastern Britain were already speaking Germanic languages at the start of the 5th century and the increasingly attested manner in which the locals and the comparatively few incomers quickly became integrated. And 680 was about the time when the firm grip of Rome began to tighten, leading to bans on grave goods in Christian graves.

As Francis Pryor points out, the parts of Britain that became truly Anglicised were the ones that had been truly Romanised and were therefore ready and willing to adopt a new lifestyle, particularly if there were advantages.

[sollers]

Further point: the King of the West Saxons at that time was Caedwalla, who had a British name, like many of his predecessors; his chief enemy was the South Saxons and his most noted achievement was the total massacre of all the Germanic inhabitants (probably Jutes but could have been Saxons) of the Isle of Wight because they were not Christians and didn't want to be. Mercia, the next kingdom north, had a tendency to ally with Welsh rulers against other Anglo-Saxons, sometimes Christian Welsh joining pagan Mercians to fight Christian Northumbrians.

BTW, with a very few exceptions (the main one I can think of is Canterbury, which was chiefly occupied by Saxons by 500) the cities dropped out of use during the 5th century; even in the previous century they were little more than administrative centres with no real town life. In any case they were abandoned as
after the climatic disasters and plague of the mid 6th century, which was also the date when the West Saxons moved inland from the coastal strip.

I have a beautiful edition of this

[jinty]

Hardback, with a Charles Keeping dustcover, and lovely illos of his inside. One of my favourite books, and one that I re-read quite a bit. R loves the Lantern Bearers in particular, so we are a Rosemary Sutcliff household!

[heliopausa.livejournal.com]

I like it very much; it's a great message, about holding on through the dark times. (I have the same edition jinty has.)
It's only now, reading what you've written (yes, it feels like dark times coming), that I've put it in context of other post-war stories of children picking their way through ruins - The Silver Sword comes to mind, but also the plethora of English stories which had children on "bomb-sites". That's a good while after the war, of course; I expect it took a while before things felt faceable, in writing for children.